Workshop  May 24, 2016
Copenhagen Business School
Porcelænshaven 16B, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
“The Studio” (Ground Floor)

Deadline: April 18, 2016 for abstracts

Conveners:
Bill Gartner (Copenhagen Business School)
David Kirsch (Univ. of Maryland)
Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School)
R. Daniel Wadhwani (Univ. of the Pacific)
Friederike Welter (Univ. of Siegen and Institut für
Mittelstandsforschung Bonn)
After previous workshops in Copenhagen (2014), Miami (2015) and Portland
(2016) we are happy to announce the fourth workshop in the series “Historical
Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research” to be held at Copenhagen
Business School on May 24, 2016.

In recent years, both business historians and entrepreneurship scholars have
grown increasingly interested in the promise of using historical sources, methods
and reasoning in entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be
valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to
studying entrepreneurship, including in accounting for contexts and institutions,
in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic
change, in providing multi-level perspectives on the entrepreneurial process and
in situating entrepreneurial behavior and cognition within the flow of time.
Support for historical research on entrepreneurship has grown, with both leading
entrepreneurship researchers and business historians calling for the use of
historical perspectives and with Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal announcing
a call for papers for a special issue devoted to history and entrepreneurship.
The purpose of this workshop is to provide scholars with developmental feedback
on work-in-progress related to historical approaches to entrepreneurship and
strategy, broadly construed. Our aim is to support the development of historical
research on entrepreneurship for publication in leading journals, including for
the special issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship
Journal.

In addition to providing feedback and suggestions for specific topics, the workshop will address the commonly faced challenges of writing for a double-audience of historians and
entrepreneurship/management scholars, engaging entrepreneurship theory and
constructs, and identifying the most valuable historical sources and methods in
studying entrepreneurial phenomena. We welcome work-in-progress at all stages
of development. Interested scholars may submit two types of submissions for
discussion: full research papers (8,000 words) or paper ideas (1,000 to 3,000
words).
The workshop and broader project is an initiative of the Copenhagen Business
School’s Centre for Business History and Department of Management, Politics,
and Philosophy in collaboration with scholars and institutions throughout
Europe and North America. We are also grateful for support from the
Entrepreneurship Platform and the Rethinking History in Business Schools
Initiative at CBS.

AS: I’m looking forward to a paper development workshop that will be taking place the day before the Business History Conference in Portland.  I’ll be presenting a paper co-authored with Kevin Tennent. Our paper seeks to combine the Judgment-Based View of Entrepreneurship with the Past Futures methodology developed by the historian Ged Martin.

Paper Development Workshop
Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research

Embassy Suites
319 SW Pine Street
Portland, OR 97204

March 31, 2016
9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

9:00 – 9:15 a.m.                    Welcome

9:15 – 10:15 a.m.          Turning Points and Financial Innovation

Commentator: David Kirsch (University of Maryland, College Park)

“Creative Construction: The Importance of Fraud and Froth in Emerging Technologies,” Jonathan Coopersmith (Texas A&M University)

“Entrepreneurship, Financial Systems and Economic Development,” Steven Toms, Nick Wilson and Mike Wright (University of Leeds Business School and Imperial College London)

10:15 – 11:15 a.m.        Entrepreneurial Uses of History

Commentator: Roy Suddaby (University of Victoria)

“The Legacy of 20th Century Black American Entrepreneurs: Education and Entrepreneurial Self –Efficacy,” Carolyn Davis and Keith Hollingsworth (Morehouse College)

“Strategic and Institutional Uses of the Past by Family Philanthropic Foundations,” Ida Lunde Jorgensen (Copenhagen Business School) and Roy Suddaby (University of Victoria)

“An Entrepreneur’s Cathedral: Expressing and Preserving Founder Legacy in a Family Business. The Case of Fiberline Composites,” Ellen M. Korsager and Anders Ravn Sørensen (Copenhagen Business School)

11:15 – 11:45am                   Coffee Break

11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.          Entrepreneurial Biographies Revisited

Commentator: Mads Mordhorst (Copenhagen Business School)

“Entrepreneurs as Actors: Biographical Approaches and the Analysis of Entrepreneurship,” Uwe Spiekermann (Goettingen University)

“Institutional Entrepreneurship and Ideological Rhetoric: Establishing the Global Hotel Industry” Mairi Maclean and Charles Harvey (Newcastle University Business School)

“Paran Stevens and the Birth of Hotel Entrepreneurship,” Daniel Levinson Wilk (Fashion Institute of Technology, New York)

12:45 – 2:15 p.m.                 Lunch

2:15 – 3:15pm                 History and Entrepreneurship

Commentator: Andrew Nelson (University of Oregon)

“What Entrepreneurial History Could Be and Why It Matters,” Dan Raff (Wharton School / University of Pennsylvania)

“Reconciling the JBV and the Past Futures Methodology: Towards a Synthesis and Research Methodology,” Andrew Smith (University of Liverpool) and Kevin Tennent (University of York)

3:15 – 3:45 p.m.                    Coffee Break

3:45 – 4:45 p.m.            International Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change

Commentator: Geoffrey Jones (Harvard Business School)

“Born Global in 1850: A Historical Method for Understanding Entrepreneurs Across Time and Space,” Michael Aldous (Queen’s University, Belfast)

“Freeing the Market: Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change in Brazil, 1874-1904,” Kari E. Zimmerman and David L. Deeds (University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota)

4:45 – 5:00 p.m.                    Concluding discussion

I would like to promote an important upcoming event that has been organized by the European Business History Association (EABH).  The event, which is taking place at the Austrian central bank, will be of interest to all those who do research in bank archives. The event on bank archives will be followed the next day by a very interesting  conference on Financial Interconnections in History: Did financial globalisation increase or decrease stability?

28 April 2016
Oesterreichische Nationalbank
Hauptanstalt
Otto-Wagner-Platz 3
1090 Vienna
Austria
The workshop aims to present, deepen and expand the knowledge and skills related to financial institutions’ online archives. It aims to support archivists and records managers in strategically planning and implementing the online presentation of their institutions’ archives.
The workshop will examine three aspects:
1) How to choose which information to provide online,
2) how to meet users’ expectations,
3) how to publish and disseminate data online.
A practical LAB session will close the workshop.
The training is free for EABH members and carries a minimal charge for non-members.

Financial Interconnections in History: Did financial globalisation increase or decrease stability?

29 Apr 2016
Vienna, Austria

Globalisation is perceived as an inevitable and irreversible phenomenon, the process of globalisation of financial markets however has not followed a deterministic path of inexorable progress.
Examining globalisation in the long term allows a more textured view of advances and reversals, acceleration and deceleration. These waves are caused by financial innovation, technological and methodological changes as well as responses of markets and regulators to periodic bubbles and crises. While aspects of the ‘Great Reversal’ of the 1930s has been well documented, the advances and retreats toward globalisation from the 1960s onward have been less well understood. After 30 years of globalisation, there is an opportunity to reflect on the dramatic changes that took place in global financial markets on the eve of the globalisation of the 1990s and examine how the structures and patterns of global financial markets were established.

In the 1980s and 1990s a new wave of technologies and mathematical modelling transformed the nature and performance of international capital markets, prompting new entrants, new structures and new markets. In turn, these innovations generated fresh challenges for prudential supervision, risk assessment and regulation that persisted through the ensuing 30 years.

This conference will explore these themes from a longer term perspective as well as drawing on the experience and testimony of participants in the transformation of markets in the 1980s and 1990s.

Please note that modifications of the programme are still viable at this point and we apologise for any inconvenience that might incur.

08.00 – 08.15 Welcome Coffee
08.15 – 08.30 Welcome Address

Ewald Nowotny, Governor Oesterreichische Nationalbank

Carmen Hofmann, Secretary General eabh
08.30 – 08.45 Introduction

Hugo Bänziger, Partner at Lombard Odier and Chairman of eabh

08.45 – 09.15 Keynote

Marc Flandreau, Graduate Institute Geneva

‘Anthropology and finance: financial history of Victorian science’

09.15 – 10.15 Panel One: Austria and the World

1.) Clemens Jobst, Oesterreichische Nationalbank

‘Opportunities and risks of regional globalisation of the Austrian banking sector in the interwar period – similarities and differences to today’

2.) Aurel Schubert, European Central Bank

‘Opportunities and risks of regional globalisation of the Austrian banking sector in the interwar period – similarities and differences to today’

3.) Stefan Schmitz, Oesterreichische Nationalbank

‘OeNB’s reaction to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in 1971’

Moderator: Walter Antonowicz, Oesterreichische Nationalbank
10.15 – 11.00 Panel Two: Insurance and Bubbles in History

1.) Robin Pearson, University of Hull: ‘What was the role of Empire in the internationalization of British insurance?’

2.) Stefan Hofrichter, Allianz Global Investors
‘Asset Bubbles in History’

Moderator: tba
11.00 – 11.15 Coffee break
11.15 – 12.45 Panel Three: Waves of Globalisaton: The big Technological change of the 1990s (oral history)

1.) Andreas Gottschling, Erste Bank

2.) Kay Haigh, Morgan Stanley

3.) Mick Wood, former Deutsche Bank

Moderator: Hugo Bänziger, Lombard Odier
12.45 – 13.45 lunch
13.45 – 14.45 Panel Four: Globalisation and Financial Crises in Emerging Economies (19th-20th century)

1.) Juan Flores, University of Geneva

‘Revolutionaries, caudillos and financial markets: Winners and losers from Latin America’s first debt crisis

2.) Sebastian Alvarez, University of Geneva
‘Playing with fire? The internationalization and condition of Mexican banks prior to the 1982 debt crisis’

3.) Ali Coskun Tuncer, Universtiy College of London
‘Sovereign default, foreign control and political resistance in the European periphery before 1914’

Moderator: Piet Clement, Bank for International Settlements
14.45 – 15.45 Panel Five: Selected Research

1.) Markus Lampe, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien

‘Bilateral flows of postal money orders’

2.) Andrea Papadia, London School of Economics

‘Sovereign default during the Great Depression: New evidence for the case that fiscal resilience matters more than debt levels’

Nuno Palma, University of Groningen

‘Danger to the old lady of Threadneedle Street?The Bank of England, financial intermediation, and the regime shift to paper money (1797-1821)’

Moderator: Catherine Schenk, University of Glasgow
15.45 – 16.00 Coffee break
16.00 – 16.30 Concluding Remarks

Catherine Schenk, University of Glasgow
16.30 – 17.00 Closing reception
17.00 End of annual meeting

2015 saw the passing into law of the Modern Slavery Act.  Questions have been raised over the act’s ability to deal with British companies profiting from modern day slavery in their supply chains. Inspired by Fairtrade Fortnight 2016 the International Slavery Museum will bring together a panel of experts to discuss issue surrounding fair trade and supply chains.  Panellists will explore the Britain’s history of anti-slavery, recent policy developments on supply chains, and on-going campaigns relating to fair trade and the supply chain.

Speakers include:

Dr. Amanda Berlan, Senior Lecturer in Ethical Business at the University of Coventry. Dr. Berlan has worked with policy makers and NGOs in her work on Cocoa production.

Caroline Nash-Smith, Education Officer at the Dalit Freedom network and owner of a fair trade business called Life’s Treasures.

Glynn Rankin, PhD researcher at the University of Liverpool, is a former Chief Crown Prosecutor in England and Wales, and manages and coordinates the Trafficking in Persons Platform (TIPP), a global anti-trafficking forum for prosecutors.

Chair: Claire Moxham, Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at the University of Liverpool.

Tea and coffee will be provided.

WHENTuesday, 1 March 2016 from 14:00 to 16:00 (GMT) WHEREAnthony Walker Education Centre – International Slavery Museum. Albert Dock. Liverpool L3 4AX GB

Are the ideas of the late Alfred Chandler coming back into fashion? In a 2015 blog post about Google’s transformation into a  conglomerate called Alphabet, Richard Langlois speculated that such a trend might be underway.  The title of an upcoming event at Cass Business School in London also suggests that Chandlerian ideas are making a comeback, as the title of the event is a clearly a reference to Chandler’s magnum opus Scale and Scope.

Scale, Scope and Firm Boundaries in Technology-Based Industries: Novel Reflections and Directions for Future Research
25th- 26th February 2016

Cass Business School, City University London

Organizer: Dr. Elena Novelli, Cass Business School, ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellow
Event funded by the ESRC Future Research Leaders Grant

#scaleandscope

In the last few decades technological change has led to a substantial reduction in the costs of transacting and to a massive increase in connectivity and reach, stimulating a parallel reconfiguration in the architecture of many industries. Firms have been exhibiting very divergent diversification and integration patterns. Some firms have been expanding their scope considerably (e.g. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple) sometimes in vertical and sometimes in complementary or horizontal directions; others have been expanding in some directions (e.g. horizontal), but contracting in others (e.g. vertical). Some firms have even emerged as “virtual corporations”.

These patterns raise many questions that revitalize the lively debate on the knowledge and market boundaries of technology-based firms and the trade-offs that different scale and scope configurations impose to them:

Is internal innovation still a feasible strategy in today’s complex technological and product environment? To what extent can knowledge be effectively acquired through external sources and what are the costs of using this strategy for firms’ economic and innovative performance?

To what extent has technological change really reduced within-firm coordination costs and hence expanded the optimal scope of the firm? Under what conditions, instead, does technology reduce transaction costs across markets even more than within firms, so that the optimal scope of the firm is now reduced?

Which organizational forms and related business models are likely to be the most successful in the current environment and which industry configurations are likely to emerge in equilibrium?

This workshop will bring together leading scholars that have contributed to research on knowledge and market boundaries of firms for the purpose of stimulating an interactive discussion on the topic and reflecting on new avenues for future research.

Agenda

Feb 25th
6pm – 830 pm. Pre-workshop panel event.
How Important Are a Company Size and Its Business Scope to Succeed in Today’s Business and Technological Environment?

The event is free but places are limited, please register via Eventbrite or contact faculty.administration@city.ac.uk

Feb 26th
9am-5pm. Research workshop.
Scale, Scope and Firm Boundaries in Technology-Based Industries: Novel Reflections and Directions for Future Research.

The event is free but places are limited, please register here or contact faculty.administration@city.ac.uk

0915 Welcome and Introduction

Gianvito Lanzolla, Cass Business School, Head of the Faculty of Management, Project Mentor

Gautam Ahuja, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Project Mentor
Elena Novelli, Cass Business School, ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellow
0945 Session 1: The Knowledge Boundaries of Firms

Chair: Stefan Haefliger, Cass Business School

Keld Laursen, Copenhagen Business School

Gary Dushnitsky, London Business School

Dovev Lavie, Technion

Paola Criscuolo, Imperial College Business School

Carliss Baldwin, Harvard Business School

1100 Coffee break

1130 Session 2: Firm Scope, Competition and Performance

Chair: Gianvito Lanzolla, Cass Business School

Lourdes Sosa, London School of Economics

Bart Clarysse, Imperial College Business School

Stefano Brusoni, ETH Zurich

Jerker Denrell, Warwick Business School

1245 Lunch

1400 Session 3: Organizational Structure and Firm Boundaries

Chair: Costas Andriopoulos, Cass Business School

Nicholas Argyres, Olin Business School

Aseem Kaul, Carlson School of Management

Evan Rawley, Columbia Business School

Erkko Autio, Imperial College Business School

Martin Kilduff, University College London School of Management

1515 Coffee break

1545 Panel debate: Scale, Scope and Firm Boundaries : Reflections and Novel Research directions

Chair: Elena Novelli, Cass Business School

Gautam Ahuja, Ross School of Business

Nicholas Argyres, Olin Business School

Carliss Baldwin, Harvard Business School

Marianne Lewis, Cass Business School, Dean

Wrap-up and Conclusions

1700 Wine reception

Next month, I’ll be presenting a co-authored paper at at the Connecting Eastern & Western Perspectives on Management, Warwick Business School. The conference, which has been organized by the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies, takes place 21st-23rd March 2016. The keynote speakers for this year’s conference are confirmed as Professor Paul Beamish (Ivey Business School) and Professor Yadong Luo (University of Miami). The central theme of the conference is “The exchange of academic knowledge increasingly flows in both directions, from West to East and East to West. This conference seeks to help establish a foundation for further development of this fertile exchange of ideas between East and West. We hope also to develop not only how the East may form boundary conditions to the established theories in the West, but also help to lay the foundation for indigenous theory building from the East.” For more details about the Special Issue of JMS that will come out of this conference, see here.

Our paper addresses this theme, although we also seek to problematize the concepts of East and West with our paper. I’ve pasted the abstract below.

Unfortunately, my wonderful co-author Miriam Kaminishi of the School of Business at the   Macau University of Science and Technology cannot come to Warwick for the conference, so I will be presenting solo. (I will be presenting alongside Miriam about a week later at the Business History Conference in Oregon, where we will be speaking about a very different co-authored paper we have been working on). Miriam (see picture below) is a fantastic research collaborator who is at the start of her academic career and who will doubtless make important contributions to management research and to the fields of economic history and the history of entrepreneurship.

Recurring Debates in English-Language Analysis of Chinese Entrepreneurship: Towards A Genealogy of Theoretical Frameworks

Abstract:

This paper compares how Chinese entrepreneurship was represented in English-language texts published in two historical periods: 1842-1911 and post-1978. During the first period, Western expatriates advanced a variety of competing explanations for why entrepreneurship was (apparently) less developed in China than in the West. These opinions were shared through the media of books, consular trade reports, newspapers, and learned journals. Since 1978, China has once again been integrated into the world economy and Westerners have resumed their debates about Chinese entrepreneurship. This paper shows that ongoing academic discussion of entrepreneurship in China and other Chinese societies exhibits some striking parallels with the discourses of the pre-1911 period. Our Foucauldian genealogy shows that all lenses for viewing entrepreneurship have historical roots and philosophical foundations of which the scholar may be unconscious. By historicizing present-day theories of entrepreneurship, this paper should encourage greater scholarly reflexivity.

Authors: Andrew Smith*, University of Liverpool Management School; Miriam Kaminishi, School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology.

Key words: entrepreneurship theory; Chinese entrepreneurship, postcolonialism; Weber; Redding ;Foucauldian genealogy; institutions; culture; religion; Confucianism

Yesterday, I was privileged to attend an ESRC-funded seminar at Alliance Manchester Business School on the theme of historicising the theory and practice of organizational analysis. The particular focus on yesterday’s event was on ethnographic and phenomenological approaches. I gained a great deal from this event which saw the exchange of views by org studies scholars,  business historians, and people from the discipline of archival science. I was introduced to ethnographic research methods and the associated theoretical debates, which is simply something I didn’t know that much about before. I also learned a great deal from the papers that are closer to my own home research tradition of business history. I would say that I got the most from Stephanie Decker‘s excellent paper on archival ethnography.

Listening to Stephanie discuss her paper made me realize the usefulness to my own research of Stoler (2009)’s concept of “history in the subjunctive,” the use of archival sources to explore how historical actor expected the future to unfold.  Although Decker mentioned Stoler’s approach in her 2013 article in M&OH, I didn’t realise the relevance of Stoler’s ideas to my own work until yesterday. To some of my readers, especially here in the UK, the term History in the Subjunctive will bring back memories of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. I, however, associated Stephanie’s discussion of Stoler’s historical subjunctive more closely with Professor Ged Martin’s 2004 book Past Futures: the Impossible Necessity of History.  As I wrote in a 2005 review of Martin’s book,

Martin defines history as essentially the study of decisions taken by people in the past. He conceives the historian’s task as attempting to establish the thinking of historical actors at the time of decision, because this information illuminates the questions of why, how, and when a decision was taken. For Martin, understanding how the decision-makers in a given situation perceived their futures is crucial to historical analysis, for in making a particular choice, a historical actor is opening the door to one sort of future while closing off another (pp. 111-148). Consideration of past futures is therefore an inescapable part of historical analysis, according to Martin, because it helps us to discern which decisions were significant in their consequences while emphasizing the problems with notions of historical inevitability

As a business historian, I have now been motivated to read Stoler’s book and to investigate more closely how her epistemology compares with that of Ged Martin.

I have pasted a list of the workshop programme below.

0930-1000       Arrival and Refreshments

1000-1015       Welcome and Introduction

1015-1100       Alan McKinlay (Newcastle U): “Foucault and the archive”

1100-1145       Bill Cooke (York U): “The affect of the archive”

1145-1200       Coffee/Tea

1200-1245       Andrea Whittle (Newcastle U): “History-in-action”

1245-1330       Buffet Lunch

1330-1415       Andrea Bernardi (Manchester Metropolitan U): “Auto-ethnography”

1415-1500       Stephanie Decker (Aston U) “Archival ethnography”

1500-1515       Coffee/Tea

1515-1600       Lucy Newton (Reading U): “Corporate identity”

1600-               Discussion and Closing Remarks

Stoler, A. L. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

New publication alert: Foundations of Managing Sporting Events
Organizing the 1966 FIFA World Cup (Routledge) by Kevin Daniel Tennent and Alex Giles Gillett

Book abstract:
2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1966 FIFA World Cup, hosted in England. Unlike previous literature, which has tended to focus activities on the field Foundations of Managing Sporting Events will examine the management process in the buildup and execution of the event.

Answering questions such as; How was the process of delivering the 1966 FIFA World Cup managed? Was government intervention necessary to deliver the 1966 FIFA World Cup? What perceived social and economic benefits did England gain from hosting the FIFA World Cup and

What does the 1966 FIFA World Cup case tell us about collaborative and network management theories this intriguing new volume looks at the first significant UK government intervention in football and how this created a significant legacy as the government started to take a real interest in leisure facilities and stadium safety as policy areas after this competition.

Foundations of Managing Sporting Events will be of considerable interest to research academics working on aspects of post war British, Imperial and World history including sport, social, business, economic and political history